I don't mean to turn this blog into a political destination, but since Will kindly notes my Vice Presidential debate thoughts from last night, I figured I would engage in a quick clarification for those uninterested in my own blog.

What I said last night wasn't that Cheney makes me glad to be a Republican. Rather, my point was akin to Will's, in a weaker and slightly different form. Seeing Cheney sitting there opposite Edwards reminded me that somewhere out in the hinterlands of Republican support, there's a great mass of people who were silently cheering every one of Cheney's supposedly evil votes against social programs, who don't think it's the federal government's job to fund meals on wheels, who aren't interested in what the multitudes are doing with themselves or their money. Though I'm much more positive on our efforts overseas than Will seems to be, clearly the current President isn't of like mind in terms of domestic policy. My point, in other words, was less to laud Republicanism, and more to lament its apparent surrender to the wiles of Clintonite social democracy. Cheney served to remind me that even though my allies aren't running the ideological show right now, they're still out there, and perhaps not too far away. And that, I think, is hopeful.

Partisan politics are usually outside of my bailiwick, but since Co-Crescatter Waddling Thunder has posted some thoughts on why Cheney makes him happy to be a Republican, I'll add a few thoughts on why he makes me despair.

WT writes:

I'm a Republican because I think people should be left alone to the extent they don't bother anyone else, and that the government's job is to keep our enemies from bothering us, and to destroy those who do, and to make our glorious victories abroad the stuff of history. That's it.

No joke - Wolfgang Puck just made me dinner and they were the tastiest mashed potatoes I've ever eaten. Flu-struck and star-struck, I just stood there, mouth agape, as he came over and talked to me. I am quite sure that this wasn't a feverish delusion.

In my AP Government class senior year, my teacher consistently wrote comments on my exam like, "This is good, Will, but you must tone down your florid prose; the AP graders won't like it." He was right. I refused to tone down my "florid prose" and my score on the AP Gov't test was lower than any of my others. Some things do not change.

From the T.A.'s comments in response to my first memo for my Con. Law. class:

I have the unfortunate task of urging you in this next draft to crush some of your prose's elegance in order to conform to the structures of legal writing. Think T/IRAC (see memo) and being as concise as possible.

Read on if you have an interest in a rant about teaching English in Kazakhstan. . . . Otherwise, don’t waste your time with reading something that I don’t care to make particularly coherent. What good is a rant if it’s not in the form of stream-of-consciousness?

Maybe time will improve things.

”But I digress. From my years spent as a teacher I know one has to repeat everything twice over to ensure at least the possibility of creating some order out of what appears to be chaos.” - Cees Nooteboom

Parts of the teaching job are frustrating, and it’s frustrating again that the word ‘frustrating’ isn’t in my slim Kazakh-English dictionary. When I washed dishes and grew sweetpotatoes in a plant pathology lab, I got far more lectures on fungi reproduction than I really needed to know to do my job, but this was because my boss thought it was also her job to teach me; when I worked at the Press, they went out of their way to teach me about book publishing simply because I was interested; when I researched for the Judge, I learned about his projects and what the other assistants were researching during group meetings. But here, no one says, “look, I have 25 years of experience as an English teacher; let me tell you what I have learned about teaching over the years.” So, pessimistically, I’ve started thinking that what the other English teachers’ experiences have taught them is how to get through the days of the weeks and of the years, doing the quality of job they need to do to be able to sleep peacefully at night. And now I’m frustrated because I feel I could do a better job of teaching if I weren’t team-teaching, both in the classroom at the same time, as my local counterparts G---Apai and R---Apai.

In my old jobs, there was the general expectation that whatever you did, you should do quite well, for there was a reputation for quality to maintain (ok, so maybe the floor of the lab didn’t have to be swept clean enough to eat off of and you could slide a bit there, but plant transplants done in sterile had better be sterile). Here, the teachers repeat “We’re lazy”, “we don’t know”, “we have forgotten”, “we went to Kazakh language universities a quarter of a century ago, and those had even worse quality then.” Look, if it’s English language questions you have, ask me. If it’s something you want explained, let me know: I can almost certainly tell you what is right and what is wrong, and I can give a good stab at explaining whatever rule might govern that situation. If you want me to suggest some sort of activity, somewhat connected to the theme, that would get the students up out of their seats and talking to each other in English. . . oh, why even pretend to set my hopes so high?

“The students can’t speak.” Well, yes, that’s fairly true. But the proper response is to include even more speaking activities in the lesson plan; it’s not to skip everything that requires speaking. When I suggest doing a speaking activity that’s even in the text, the exercise is reserved in case there’s extra time after the rote translations are finished. And the lesson plan’s another problem. Last week with G---Apai she said she was tired, for me to just write the week’s lesson plans for the ninth graders. So I did, and she then copied them word for word, and what we taught that week in class was the plan only half of the time. And this week with R---Apai, she was tired and wanted to go home, so after briefly discussing the plan for the coming week, the planning time was over; she had said she would simply write them herself.

But the plans the teachers write are essentially a list of the exercises in the text, in numerical order. Unfortunately, the teachers often do not understand the exercises themselves. Last week, I walked G---Apai and R---Apai through a textbook exercise they wanted to do with the students. I essentially just sat and solved every problem for them, since I know how to create subordinating clauses, how to parse cheesy British slang, and how to intuit the proper English words that should be substituted for the textbook’s mistakes. They dutifully copied down what I said. And then I asked them if they understood why the correct answer was what it was. They did not. And I asked if they thought the students had a chance of solving the exercise. They agreed with me that they did not. The 9th form students have a shaky knowledge of the present simple tense; prepositional clauses in which the object of the preposition is a noun clause, are far beyond their abilities. And then I had to teach that very lesson this week! The students didn’t know what they were saying when I fed them the answers, and R---Apai couldn’t translate it for them.

And sometimes, when the teachers say that they do not understand a particular exercise, I will point out that if they read to the bottom of the page, they will see that it is continued over on the next page. And then they will understand the exercise. If they have read the entire chapter that we are now teaching, they did not understand it well, or remember it extremely poorly. And I wish that I had not pointed out that the answers to some exercises are in the back of the book, and then it is suggested that those exercises be given as tests. “You want to give a multiple-choice test on movie theater show times and prices at various famous London cinemas? I don’t even know the answers to these questions!” That exercise was finally downgraded from test to possible exercise. I can’t think what the students will learn from the exercise, other than some trivia about London cinemas that they’ll forget the next day.

And oh -- the 8th form took a test earlier this week. They took a test because the teachers did not feel like teaching, I suspect, for we haven’t a book yet, and lessons haven’t had a theme connecting them. G---Apai went to the file of old tests, grabbed one that R---Apai said was easy, and then asked me if her answers to the first 15 questions were correct. The test was multiple-choice, with only three options. Less than half of G---Apai’s answers were correct. And then she administered the test by handing it to one student, so that student could write it on the chalkboard for the other students to copy down.

There’s not an actual lack of time for planning lessons. The work day, by the way, lasts from roughly 10:00 to 3:00; I stay later to hold extra sessions with the better students. There’s generally a break of at least 90 minutes in the middle. But lesson planning time keeps being pushed back in favor of chai time (nothing can stand in the way of a call to drink tea and eat sweets), or taken over by the need to talk about next month’s party, or the perpetual husband problems. So, every class, something gets taught, but it doesn’t really feel coherent, merely sequential. And knowing there’s a 50% chance my preparation will never be used dramatically reduces my incentive to spend money buying tablecloths, which is what I use for posters (it’s the closest and cheapest approximation to butcher paper or newsprint) and time writing posters at home.

And I know I throw screws in the works that G---Apai and R---Apai have planned. I stopped the students as they were reading out short texts on recent movies; I stopped them, and asked them if they understood what they had just read. We had been talking about settings for several of the previous days. Fine, so what is the setting of the movie “Elizabeth”? Silence. Finally, the question, what is setting? I re-explained it. We got through “Elizabeth.” The next movie was “Paulie” (some movie about a talking parrot). I asked again for the setting, knowing quite well that the text did not say (modern-day, probably America). “The bloody 16th century.” “Great Britain.” “44 years” [the length of Q. E. I’s reign]. No, no, no. The answer to a question about “Paulie” is not in the text about “Elizabeth.” You see how the paragraph stops, and there’s a new header. . . oh, lord. No, neither “parrot” nor “voiced by Mohr” is the setting. I slowly translated the text into simple English, and they translated the text into Kazakh. Now, what is the setting? And they kept trying to answer from the text! They were shocked when I told them that the text did not say. How can they be shocked, given that they understood the Kazakh meaning of all of the words, I cannot understand. But had I not stopped the students as they were reading the short texts, G---Apai would have simply corrected their pronunciation and translated the texts into Kazakh for them (which she could do since I had helped her with that earlier).

And the translations are a clue to the problem. We don’t spend much time doing lesson plans, since often the first part of all lesson planning time is taken up by my explaining what the textbook says, and helping them translate it for themselves (or sometimes I succeed in just dismissing sections as having to high a ratio of difficulty to actual pedagogical purpose. . . what the students need to learn now isn’t British teen magazine slang like “brolly” and “gorge”). And then it’s time for chai, having prepared a sketch of what will be done at the next lesson, not a plan. You can grab a 20oz cup of tea or coffee and take it with you to sip as you work, but here tea cups are about 4oz and only filled halfway (a polite gesture to indicate that you are willing to refill your guest’s cup as many times as he desires; a full cup is a cold shoulder).

I joined the Peace Corps hoping I could be a good teacher. I thought I found out in training that I had the skills to be a good teacher. But I’m trying to figure out how I can create the setting in which I can be a good teacher, and right now, I don’t have an answer to that. The Peace Corps certainly encourages excellence, but at my school, popularity with the students seems to be good enough.

About the only bright spot is the grammar lessons I’ve started this week. Once a week (or maybe more, since these are lessons for which almost all the prep work falls entirely on my shoulders), I’ll be reviewing English grammar with the 8th and 9th grade students. I’m beginning with the present simple, and hopefully moving on through the perfect and continuous tenses. And these lessons will have explanatory posters, team games, speaking activities, room for creative answers, and texts pumping the students full of information that I want them to learn (starting, perhaps, with “What is the Peace Corps?”).

A reader writes in on non-consensual outing and its political alternatives:

I am straight, but if I were gay and closeted I would rather be outed by a public showing of surveillance video showing me fellating a midget in a public restroom in Philadelphia than be forced to watch more reruns of "Will and Grace."

With apologies: I've done most of the translations here myself. Many to most of them -- if not all -- are really heavy-handed. I'm very sorry.

Can prepositions be used to modify each other, and if so, is the preposition being modified a prepositiong, or an indeclinable (whatever that means in English) noun? This all came back to me today in Biochemistry, I noticed the words in trans both in italics -- as if both were being used in their original Latin. I think this might have be a typo on the slide, but it raises a good question, and one I have debated (often heatedly) in the middle of choir --

That is, take the Rorate Coeli text in the Vulgate Isaiah 45.8:

Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant justum.
Aperiatur terra et germinet salvatorem

That is to say:

Rain on from above, you heavens, and let the clouds rain the just. Let the earth open and give birth [set seed maybe? no, no, too vegetal] to our redeemer.

Now the question: is "desuper" just another noisome misunderstanding of some barely litterate monk -- i.e., does Medieval Latin combine de and super into one much more difficult word? That aside, what role does it play in the sentence?

The first question is actually pretty easy to answer: desuper itself wasn't a Medieval creation, but is actually used by J.C.Caesar (who is cannonically accepted to know -- rather, have known -- a little something about grammar, albeit Latin) in De Bello Gallico, book 1, section 52:

Reperti sunt complures nostri qui in phalanga insilirent et scuta manibus revellerent et desuper vulnerarent.

That is:

There were many of our comrades found who jumped on the phalanx, ripped off the shields with their hands, and attacked them from above.

I suppose, therefore, that desuper itself exists, and I'd argue that it a) not only comes from de + super, but that it is b) an adverb.

Of all the things I tend to say/have said here, my point (a) above is perhaps a little less nauseating than point (b), depending on your training and background, of course. But assuming both are true (sadly, it's often much easier to convince myself that I'm correct than to convince others) a few questions arise:

1) How does the conjunction of two prepositions make an adverb?
2) Can "desuper," or even "from above" in English have a prepositional sense?
3) Are there other conjoined prepositions that function as adverbs in Latin (or even English)?

Any aid is, of course appreciated. Please let me know if you'd like your response posted, and if so , whether you'd like your name attached.